A friend asked me to make a blanket for her baby, due at the end of March (he actually came a month early, but he is healthy, thriving, and adorable). The baby’s name is Atlas, so she thought it would be fun to make something with a map theme, if possible. I can’t resist a bit of wordplay, so of course I agreed.

It occurred to me right away that the Amazababy blanket would provide the perfect mountains for a knitted relief map, so I discarded thoughts of a road map or topo map and focused on a sculptural approach. This also set me in the direction of a heavily textured piece that would serve as a busy blanket rather than a swaddling blanket, since this baby lives in south Texas anyhow.

The Amazababy “mountains” were an absolute blast to knit! I’m going to return to this motif for future baby blankets. It uses tuck stitches (like brioche, which itself is a tuck stitch) to create the design. I adore knitting tuck stitches. There’s something about that swinging feeling of the slip-YO stitches that pleases me mightily.

The Amazababy pattern is impeccably written and explains the tuck stitches beautifully. The chart is clear and easy to follow. The pattern is a bit baffling in places, though, because it includes rows worked in waste yarn that seem unnecessary to me. I think they are a reflection of the designer’s machine knitting orientation. When I finished the tuck stitch section (the mountains), I decided not to knit the waste yarn rows at the end. Then I went back to the beginning, ran a circular through the first row of pattern stitches, and unraveled the waste yarn stitches to get them out of my way. Then I worked my way around, picking up sts along the sides and working the live sts top and bottom, and got it all situated for working in the round.

I followed the pattern’s instructions to decrease sharply in the next row, thinking that this would help plump up the little pyramid shapes…but really I think it crowds them so they can’t “inflate”. Next time I make this pattern (I’m sure there will be a next time), I’ll decrease a little bit, for firmness, but not nearly as much. The mountains look adorable anyway, though, and I am so pleased with this piece and this pattern!

After the mountains, I worked a section with bobbles to simulate forest and to give the baby another texture to play with. Turns out the bobbles are not really big enough, given the gauge at which I am working, and they are too close together so they tend to pop through to the back. It’s okay, though--the fabric is still textural and that’s what I wanted. Later in this section I included some increase/decrease “strings” sticking up out of the fabric, for baby to grab and play with. I saw these in Pop Knitting by Britt-Marie Christofferson (a favorite source of inspiration).

I continued alternating bands of textured knitting with swaths of stockinette. It was interesting to see how the textured stitches worked in relatively thick yarn (the equivalent of light worsted) on fairly small needles (which supports the structural quality). the textures are even bigger and firmer than I had hoped.

When I got to the “shoreline”, I wanted irregular curves as one would see on a map, so I improvised with short rows. The first color was easy, and I made a lovely irregular curving shoreline…but going back over it, short-rowing with a second color to get it all back to square again, was more of a challenge, especially since I’d done an intermediate section of eyelet “foam” in a third color that covered up all the German short row “pulled” stitches! But I did some careful counting and reading of my knitting, and all was soon well. This part was also great fun!

I ended the piece with more tuck stitches, this time from Nancy Marchant’s new book, Tuck Stitches (go buy it right now, it’s excellent!), and I bound off with 3-stitch I-cord. I am so happy with the results of this little knitting adventure! It’s basically a giant swatch, lol, and I learned an awful lot in the making of it.

Yarn held double throughout.

starting weight:
Amazonas 160g
Natur 97g
Wasabi 164g
Gesund 162g
Himmlisch 163g
Turkis 142g
Neptun Dark 160g